Almost a year ago, Quinns told you that it would be a wise idea to read Matul Remrit, a collaborative storytelling effort from deep within the demented and ridiculous realm of Dwarf Fortress. He wasn’t wrong and now it falls to me to tell you to watch the latest installment. There are still bits of word-text on the screen occasionally so do bring your reading spectacles but this is a short film detailing the dwarves greatest battle yet, a tale of death, bravery and tragedy.

It’s a wonderful glimpse behind the number-crunching and complexity that illustrates why Dwarf Fortress is such an important game – it isn’t scripted, but it generates so many possible scripts. I wish I had the talent to tell my tales so well.

You can start from the beginning of the saga here, or watch the video now and then go back to the beginning.

the guy who did those bronzemurder and oiifurnace did amazing art too, much, much better than this one imo.
I love the emergent storytelling of dwarf fortress, ive tried to learn it so many times to get at least a taste of these amazing events. Is there like an online podcast/video-class of some sort? A wiki is just not didactic enough.

I hadn’t read Matul Remrit in a while before this came out (probably because it hadn’t updated in a while!), so I ended up getting linked to the update by the musician who did the music for the video. He has the music for the video up on his bandcamp (for “Name Your Price”), as well as his first album, which came out on the same day – well worth checking out if you liked what you heard.

I love how it’s written in with the strange syntax and extreme specificity of in-game text. “Mule does not respond to the skin of its brother which I wear. Taunted with ‘it is good to have brothers’ and ‘I am the mule’ but still it eats unconcerned.” Awesome.

It’s amazingly well written. It really does capture the feeling that you’re reading through diaries from a completely alien society. Sure, they might look like smaller, hairier humans, but they don’t think like humans and definitely don’t act like them.

Ooh, I was wondering when they’d update. Good, I should have a few entries to catch up on. Great stuff, well worth reading if you’ve played some DF. They capture both the weird speech patterns and the childlike, psychotic behaviour and outlook of the dwarves perfectly.

I always let the lack of graphics hold me back but now I don’t really notice it anymore.
Explaining this the other day to a colleague, I was reminded of that scene from the matrix:

“Neo: Do you always look at it encoded?

Cypher: Well you have to. The image translators work for the construct program. But there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. I…I don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head.

I never knew it. It wasn’t mentioned in the 2011 cptnduck tutorials, for instance, though he made a point of mentioning them as new in the 2012 ones (just the other day). So, it’s new to me, and I’m happy to have discovered it.